Monday, October 22, 2012

After three years of writing faslanyc I am signing off. I'll still be writing about landscapes, but I've started using twitter a bit (@faslanyc) and have left NYC. Combined with the fact that the nature of my investigations, criticism and speculation has shifted, I find that this format no longer fits the bill. All of the archives from this blog have been moved over to my new home at landscape archipelago where you will be able to find new work as well as links to pieces published with other outlets, upcoming news, and a couple of new projects that are starting to take shape.I want to thank everyone I've had the chance to correspond with, interview, learn about, learn from, and occasionally harangue. What started as a nerdy way to blow off steam on my lunch breaks in Manhattan has swelled to a landscape empire with tens of readers across the globe, mostly hunting for images of Costa Rica for some reason. If you are so inclined I would love for you to come along with me to the new site. Even better, start your own writing/research project about landscape, and send me a link.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

[the 1751 Fry-Jefferson Map of Virginia; this early survey shows the number of major waterways that were used for navigation just in the colony of Virginia including the New, the Roanoke, the James, the Rappahanock, the Potomac and the York; a more complete list can be found here]

The
Industrial Revolution is often talked about in terms of technological
advancements, new strategies for processes of production, or the reorganization
of social relations. However, in the
United States it is possible that the changes occurring during this period are
best understood through a robust landscape history. More than the advent of the steam engine, the
spreading of the railroad network, the organization of the mill town, or
Taylorism, the American industrial revolution is best understood as widespread
access to navigable waterways and the concomitant rise in cheap and fast
transportation of bulk materials.

The
difficult thing about defining the industrial revolution through technology and
social relations is that they cannot explain the revolution itself- it remains
a rather vague notion when any historical account is pressed for specifics and
we are left only with knowing that something
changed. But the order-of-magnitude jump
in the economy of materials transportation affected a massive scale jump in
industrial activity. If you had a
technology or organized a new labor system that could make a thousand widgets a
day, up from 20, that didn’t matter very much unless you could get them to
markets cheaply and quickly (especially in the case of agricultural products). The railroads affected a similar change in
what has been theorized by technological historian WW Rostow as the takeoff thesis (part of his largely
debunked theory of economic development).
However, as Fogel noted in his excellent work Railroads and Economic Growth canals precipitated a far greater
jump in economy of scale over the preexisting conditions (wagon roads) than did
railroads over canals. And this massive
scale jump, something like a phase change, is perhaps a better indicator of the
American industrial revolution than is the invention of the cotton gin.

Of
course the point could easily be argued around in circles, and many great historians and critics have taken up positions on different sides of the
fight. However, the fact that it is a
discussion suggests that by considering canals (as well as railroad easements
and interstate corridors) as landscape typologies, landscape architects might
be able to contribute substantially to the field of the history of technology,
and that we would benefit from turning away from our devotion to art-history. And it suggests to me that the relationship
between landscapes and instruments is deeper than it seems.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

[the Drillfield of Virginia Polytechnic Institute in the late 19th century; note the yard lines for football games]

Last
week I brought up some of the landscape projects and indigenous forms that
shaped Thomas Jefferson’s thinking and suggested these may have influenced his
later political and architectural projects.
One of his important projects that offers a particularly potent blend of
architecture and politics is his Maverick
Plan for the University of Virginia.
For its time the design was radical in that it offered an alternative to
“one immense building”, instead proposing “a small one for every professorship,
arranged at proper distances around a square, to admit extension, connected by
a piazza”- a very clever idea that has been lionized ad nauseum by historians of that venerable institution. While there is undoubtedly more to glean from
the Jeffersonian canon through intricate epistemological jujitsu, I am
interested in what might be gained by considering the organizational principles
and landscape history of the land grant university down the great wagon road.

The
Drillfield at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute is defined by scale and
history. With regard to scale, the place
is huge. The open area at the heart of
the University of Virginia is known as the lawn. The Drillfield would contain 7 lawns, and
have room left over for a few Rotundas.
It is a monstrous, windswept space, leaving undergrads with mild
hangovers to traipse across it during dismal winters and hot summers of
Southern Appalachia. When you are at the
Drillfield you feel the Appalachians, you are at the institution created at the
terminus of the Great Wagon Road and the start of the Frontier Road headed west
to the Cumberland Gap. There is no
mistaking that there are big forces at play.

[Thomas Jefferson's Maverick Plan of the University of Virginia; the open lawn that is the structuring element of the plan would fit in to the Drillfield seven times]

The
history of the Drillfield is twisted and rambling. Rather than the materialization of a southern
aristocrat’s idealization of the proper social relationships of an intellectual
institution, it is the result of experimental uses and militarization. Originally the field served as the
horticultural farm for the Virginia Agriculture and Mechanics College (later to
become Virginia Polytechnic Institute).
In 1894 a portion of the field was given over to cadet maneuvers and for
use by the football team. At this time
the Drillfield blended proto-intramural and intercollegiate athletic events
with military exercises, agricultural experimentation, quotidian life, as well
as what European theorists would call the fete
or ‘ephemeral happenings’ but which are known in southwestern Virginia as
‘snowball fights’. The first snowfall of
the year brings all classes to a halt so that the student population can divide
in to cadets and civilians and engage in some wintry tactical maneuvers.

The
Drillfield does not care. It doesn’t
care about me or my ideas of the spatial relationships that are proper for
pursuing higher education. But it does
offer spaces of possibility and new forms of use adapting to the needs and
shape of the community of which it is a part.
And it is in line with the land grant tradition created in part by the
visionary geologist William Barton Rogers.
In the 1830’s Rogers was a professor of Natural Philosophy at the
University of Virginia where he tried unsuccessfully to start an engineering
program. As noted by technological
historian Edwin Layton, he had better luck implementing his ideas for a
polytechnic school after moving to Boston, founding a little institution known
as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[This past spring the snowfight tradition metastasized into something called SnowJam 2012!A large scaffold was set up on the Drillfield and 40 tons of snow was trucked 150 miles down Interstate 81, the modern iteration of the Indian road that became the Great Wagon Road; the Drillfield has an interesting capacity to unique impressive logistical maneuvers that echo a rich and violent past with hedonistic celebration]

The
principles embodied in the land grant ideal- agricultural experimentation,
scientific applications of technology, militaristic operations, and quotidian
life- seem germane to contemporary concerns in the practice of landscape
architecture and urbanism more broadly. And
the Drillfield- big, nasty, and possible- is there as an object lesson, offering
a way to break the art-historical hegemony of our current landscape pedagogy.

Monday, October 1, 2012

[US Coast Survey 1851; this map shows the baseline used in the first US
Coast Survey, the line was established on Fire Island; image courtesy of Stony
Brook University]

Triangulation refers
to a technique used in surveying and political action as well as research
within the social sciences. In
surveying, the term means the dividing of an area into triangles using known
points and distances; angles are then measured from the known baselines to a
new point, and its distance is calculated given existing information. This technique was used especially in
circumstances that were difficult to survey by traditional means, allowing for
the staking out of new territory along coastlines, in the atmosphere (pilot
navigational charts), or in outer space (GPS satellite surveys). Within the social sciences, triangulation
refers to using more than two methods in a study in order to test results. In political action, like in chess, the term
signifies a specific maneuver in which an opponent is left with the move and at
a disadvantage.

What I’m interested
in today is what this method for the staking out new terrain might reveal when
considering the social and material implications of Thomas Jefferson’s
landscape designs. While little
discussed, many of Jefferson’s original interests and design projects were
concerned with landscape practices and concepts. In 1763 he made a study of navigation on the
Rivanna River and subsequently lead a project to make it navigable as far as
Milton, VA. In 1773 he was appointed surveyor of Albemarle County and even
though he quickly resigned the post, he would use surveying to organize his
experimental and productive agricultural landscapes. Around this time he also undertook the first
systematic proto-archeological project in the United States, leading the
stratigraphic excavation of an Indian mound near the Rivanna River.

Working toward this
reorientation, it is useful to focus on the second of Jefferson’s three major
building projects in western Virginia- Poplar Forest. As the red headed stepchild of the
Jeffersonian canon, Poplar Forest has rarely received attention alongside the
well-known constructions at Monticello and the University of Virginia. It is something of a transitional project
chronologically, aesthetically, and technologically. For that reason it promises insights into
both projects. An examination of Poplar
Forest with a focus on landscape and indigenous built forms promises insights
into the design of Jeffersonian social and educational institutions that have
remained inaccessible to Eurocentric epistemology.

[Poplar Forest near Lynchburg, VA, from the eastern mound; the summer kitchen is in the foreground and the main house is in the background]

Poplar Forest is a
main central house with a large geometric mound on either side, and impressive
lawns to the back and front.Current
theories about the existing mounds asymmetrically located on either side of the
house draw directly from European architectural theory:the mounds are supposed it to be a direct
adaptation of Palladian concepts, intended to imitate a symmetrical façade with
wings that terminate in a pavilion. Jefferson
used earthen mounds at Poplar Forest- a radically different technology than a
Palladian pavilion- but even the technology is attributed to European
precedents he had seen; in the ornamental gardens of European aristocrats
mounds were sometimes constructed throughout to create vantage points for
surveying ornamental surroundings.It is
supposed that Jefferson took these known forms and concepts and created his arrangement,
bringing in mounds close to the house to serve as cheap stand-ins for Palladian
pavilions.

This explanation is
decidedly Eurocentric and simplistic.
While this is not necessarily bad, it is highly problematic with respect
to issues of aesthetics, technology, and context. For instance, why did he plant the mounds
with trees, obscuring views, if they were traditionally used to provide vistas
over immediate ornamental grounds? What
about the fact that Poplar Forest was never intended as a public house for
entertaining, but rather as a working farm where Jefferson could make some
money to pay off his debts and get away from the never-ending string of guests
making up his public life centered at Monticello? Why were the mounds constructed asymmetrically and off-axis if they were
intended to imitate Palladian forms?
Were these truly only a cheap stand-in for more stately Palladian
pavilions? And as to the idea that they
provided a convenient disposal site for excavation from the South Lawn,
couldn’t this material have be disposed in almost any location without the
hassle of compaction techniques and geometrical construction needed to create
the mounds?

[Artists’ rendering imagining the archeological dig of an Indian mound
undertaken near Monticello by a young Thomas Jefferson; the vertical elevation
is exaggerated and indicates the various stratigraphic layers that Jefferson
made note of in the mound’s construction]

Jefferson’s views
of the Indians in Virginia were complicated. In addition to implementing policies that stripped certain nations of their land claims he had communicated his desire
that “your blood will mix with ours; and will spread, with ours, over this
great island [all of North America].” Writing
to Benjamin Hawkins during the period in which he was constructing Poplar
Forest, Jefferson said on February 18, 1803:

The ultimate point of rest and happiness for
[the Indians] is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to
intermix, and become one people. Incorporating themselves with us as citizens
of the United States, this is what the natural progress of things will of
course, bring, on, and it will be better to promote it than retard it.

This vision of
Jefferson provides impetus for a new thesis- American settlements as an exceptional blend of imported European
traditions and indigenous practices and concepts, set within a landscape that
was larger and more violent than anything that Europeans had experienced. It is known that Jefferson had great
interest in the mound structures of the native peoples that were located
throughout Virginia and had even undertaken an excavation of one in the
1770’s. Writing later he noted that:

“many
[mounds] are to be found all over this country.These are of different sizes, some of them constructed of earth, and
some of loose stones… There being one of these in my neighborhood, I wished to
satisfy myself whether any, and which of these opinions was just.For the purpose I determined to open and
examine it thoroughly… It was a spheroidical form, of about 40 feet diameter at
the base, and had been of about twelve feet altitude…”

Certain facts arise
from his early archeological work that might bring new concepts in to view when
considering the landscape and architecture of Poplar Forest. That the sizes, proportions, material
construction, and regional context were all similar in both the Indian mounds
of the area and the mounds at Poplar Forest suggest that there is much to be
learned from a more in depth consideration of the influence of Indian burial
mounds, and indigenous architectural practices in general, on the architecture,
landscape design, and ultimately public policy of Thomas Jefferson.

Despite being one
of the most digested public figures in the history of the United States, and
entire history is waiting to be written which considers Jefferson’s work from a
landscape perspective with a particular focus on the influence of indigenous
forms and practices. In doing that work
we might gain some insight in to Jefferson’s understanding of and interest in
indigenous settlements, and how he saw them “blending together” with those of
the European settlers and African slaves?
While the above questions have been traditionally considered from a
general sociological perspective, a study that focuses on the landscape design
of Poplar Forest might provide new insight not only into the design and
construction of the Lawn and the grounds of Monticello, but also help us to
understand the Public Lands Survey System, and other ambitious landscape
projects in the Americas.

[west mound with view toward the Blue Ridge Mountains beyond; some trees remain on the mounds, although historical documents suggest that the mounds were much more heavily planted according to Jefferson's original design]